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You must really hate E2EE messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram. They provide dramatically strong privacy guarantees while being proprietary and driving

You must really hate E2EE messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram. They provide dramatically strong privacy guarantees while being proprietary and driving engagement. What is the reason that users shouldn't be allowed to have the strongest guarantees of privacy possible if it happens to be the case that they are users of "proprietary apps" that want to "boost engagement" (here, of course, engagement being people talking to/with other people)? This is the most horrifying thing I've read on HN and not seen downvoted to oblivion.

jancsika 6y ago
You wrote > driving engagement I wrote > boost engagement using whatever industry standard and novel methods it can find AFAICT the challenge of something like Signal is to have a UX that feels like everything else, while being able to essentially prove by design that they cannot leverage the user's data. E.g., they can't plug the user's data into the kinds of nasty rabbit-hole algos as featured on Youtube. That's not "whatever novel methods" they can find. It's highly constrained given the privacy guarantees they are after.
- creddit 6y ago
  I didn’t mention signal. Do you claim Telegram’s channels are not novel? Do you think the FB owned WhatsApp doesn’t do whatever it can to drive engagement? Everything is constrained in some dimension. To assert that E2EE as a constraint immediately removes “whatever novel methods” from consideration is non-sensical. Is CH not constrained by being audio only? By being invite only? By being iOS only? By being mobile only? I’ll ask again, why is it that users should be denied privacy guarantees because an app is proprietary and wants to drive engagement growth? Do you demand the same for telephone lines?
  - luckygladiator 6y ago
    I sure don't want to answer the question for the guy but as a response to your chain of comments, first let's get it straight that telegram is not E2EE everywhere, it is only E2EE in secret chats. Also it is not entirely proprietary, most of the client's code is open source which is a huge bonus when you know that only your messages are not super private and not all of the data on your phone or computer. Having Facebook owned crap in the same sentence as telegram is doing telegram dirty, telegram has shown that they stand up for censorship and the program provides a pretty basic privacy level that i think should be the absolute minimum. Whatsapp on the other hand is facebook owned and we all know what that means so no need to elaborate. E2EE is not everything, it doesn't mean that your conversation are private. Even if you can prove that the proprietary app uses E2EE (Discord said they did use it for voice calls but then they posted charts of what people talked about...) there is the metadata part which is still super goddamn important. Knowing: (who talks to who, when and where, with what device...etc) is still super effective to fuck someone over. Lastly, there shouldn't be any privacy guarantee with proprietary apps because you can never know what the app will do, you can make speculations based on intercepting network packets and looking at system logs on it accessing memory places and stuff. But there is always the nice surprise of it doing not what it is supposed to do which is considered by all means malware. Remember even on a pixel with Graphene OS Proprietary apps can still use super sonic tracking if worse comes to worse for them.
  - jancsika 6y ago
    Did you even read the article? You keep harping on E2EE, but privacy features like "no screenshots" and "no way to record conversations" have absolutely nothing to do with E2EE. Those are UI defaults, which are a completely different domain of concern, one where these types of dark patterns typically and quickly emerge in these types of social networks. So again-- if someone builds the same ole' shitty proprietary business model on an "at all costs" growth model that adopts an early band of scam artists, it is without a doubt undesirable to make it difficult for the future victims of those scams to collect evidence. (And it doesn't matter that one could get a screenshot, and that one could record the audio, defaults matter.)
    - creddit 6y ago
      You keep moving the goal posts with regards to your original point which was generally about privacy. First you did it with the weasel word of “novel” while mocking my “misquoting” of you and then proceeding to reference a product I made no mention of. Now you’re talking about the specific features located in CH and then talking about “scam artists” with, of course, no meaningful definition or description of what that could possibly mean in this context. At least try to be coherent and consistent.

jancsika 6y ago

You wrote > driving engagement I wrote > boost engagement using whatever industry standard and novel methods it can find AFAICT the challenge of something like Signal is to have a UX that feels like everything else, while being able to essentially prove by design that they cannot leverage the user's data. E.g., they can't plug the user's data into the kinds of nasty rabbit-hole algos as featured on Youtube. That's not "whatever novel methods" they can find. It's highly constrained given the privacy guarantees they are after.

creddit 6y ago
I didn’t mention signal. Do you claim Telegram’s channels are not novel? Do you think the FB owned WhatsApp doesn’t do whatever it can to drive engagement? Everything is constrained in some dimension. To assert that E2EE as a constraint immediately removes “whatever novel methods” from consideration is non-sensical. Is CH not constrained by being audio only? By being invite only? By being iOS only? By being mobile only? I’ll ask again, why is it that users should be denied privacy guarantees because an app is proprietary and wants to drive engagement growth? Do you demand the same for telephone lines?
- luckygladiator 6y ago
  I sure don't want to answer the question for the guy but as a response to your chain of comments, first let's get it straight that telegram is not E2EE everywhere, it is only E2EE in secret chats. Also it is not entirely proprietary, most of the client's code is open source which is a huge bonus when you know that only your messages are not super private and not all of the data on your phone or computer. Having Facebook owned crap in the same sentence as telegram is doing telegram dirty, telegram has shown that they stand up for censorship and the program provides a pretty basic privacy level that i think should be the absolute minimum. Whatsapp on the other hand is facebook owned and we all know what that means so no need to elaborate. E2EE is not everything, it doesn't mean that your conversation are private. Even if you can prove that the proprietary app uses E2EE (Discord said they did use it for voice calls but then they posted charts of what people talked about...) there is the metadata part which is still super goddamn important. Knowing: (who talks to who, when and where, with what device...etc) is still super effective to fuck someone over. Lastly, there shouldn't be any privacy guarantee with proprietary apps because you can never know what the app will do, you can make speculations based on intercepting network packets and looking at system logs on it accessing memory places and stuff. But there is always the nice surprise of it doing not what it is supposed to do which is considered by all means malware. Remember even on a pixel with Graphene OS Proprietary apps can still use super sonic tracking if worse comes to worse for them.
- jancsika 6y ago
  Did you even read the article? You keep harping on E2EE, but privacy features like "no screenshots" and "no way to record conversations" have absolutely nothing to do with E2EE. Those are UI defaults, which are a completely different domain of concern, one where these types of dark patterns typically and quickly emerge in these types of social networks. So again-- if someone builds the same ole' shitty proprietary business model on an "at all costs" growth model that adopts an early band of scam artists, it is without a doubt undesirable to make it difficult for the future victims of those scams to collect evidence. (And it doesn't matter that one could get a screenshot, and that one could record the audio, defaults matter.)
  - creddit 6y ago
    You keep moving the goal posts with regards to your original point which was generally about privacy. First you did it with the weasel word of “novel” while mocking my “misquoting” of you and then proceeding to reference a product I made no mention of. Now you’re talking about the specific features located in CH and then talking about “scam artists” with, of course, no meaningful definition or description of what that could possibly mean in this context. At least try to be coherent and consistent.